by Terri Schlichenmeyer

BAD MOON RISING: A BAD AXE COUNTY NOVEL
JOHN GALLIGAN
� 2021 Atria
$17.00 / $23.00 Canada
324 pages

In life, a lot depends on what you find.

Dinner will be decided when you open the freezer. Your evening's entertainment is predicated on what's on TV. And if you're Sheriff Heidi Kick in the new novel Bad Moon Rising by John Galligan, you might find a few dead bodies.

The guy lying in the ditch had had a rough few hours before he expired. His body was covered with bug bites and stings from wild parsnip growing along the side roads in Bad Axe County. He'd gone unwashed for awhile, and he was half-naked, with a rubber boot on one foot, two gunshot wounds in his body, and dirt in his lungs. When the county coroner told Kick that the man had been buried alive, well, it made her sick to her stomach.

That, or she was pregnant again, though she prayed hard that the latter wasn't true. She and her husband, Harley, were having enough trouble with one of their twin boys. She needed another baby like she needed another missing person case.

Leroy "Grape" Fanta had seen action in Vietnam, was injured and exposed to Agent Orange, came home, and ended up in small-town Wisconsin, becoming a newspaperman. Covering the southwest Wisconsin area was all he knew and what he'd loved until Babette Rickreiner purchased the Bad Axe Broadcaster and Grape was fired, maybe as a part of her son Barry's campaign to kick Kick out of office and be the next sheriff.

In your mind somewhere, there may be a checklist of things you need in a good mystery: a few gruesomely dead bodies, for sure; a crimesolver who isn't squeaky-clean; murder scenes that make you grimace, perhaps. And a sense of forboding, yes! All of which you'll find in Bad Moon Rising.

Galligan sets his latest novel during a heatwave, complete with late-summer shawls of wriggling tree parasites – both of which are downright uncomfortable, even though they're placed off to the side of the story. Their presence make this tale feel ominous, as if it's sneaking up behind you, causing you to look over your shoulder or scratch a sudden, squirmy itch.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves here. Just read the book, and you'll find it to be quite the mystery.